Page 191 of Tracked and Taken

I take the disc. I lift the leather cord over her head. The cord settles at the back of her neck, under her hair. The disc settles at the hollow above her sternum, between her collarbones, just above where her uniform collar will, on every shift she works for the rest of her life, sit.

The disc against her skin.

The disc warms.

The mark at her throat warms in the answering register the mark runs at when the pheromone-tag of a bonded male’s commissioned brass arrives at the female’s body for the first time.

She makes another sound.

This one is also not a word.

The pheromone reservoir at the back of the brass, registers the bonded chemistry at her skin and begins to release at the low concentration Velran calibrated. I clock the first wave at four seconds. The scent is mine. The scent is mine at the bonded register a Draelith male’s rosettes only release when his bonded female is naked under him. Her scent at this moment is outrageous.

She does not, at this moment, register the scent. Her own bonded chemistry has calibrated to mine at the saturation level her body no longer notices. She is, this evening, carrying the pheromone register of a bonded female who has just been mounted by her bonded male in her own bed, walking it, breathing it, broadcasting it, and she does not, at this moment, know.

She is going to know.

She is not, this evening, going to know.

Her hand goes to the disc. Her thumb at the front face, at the engraved Junction One pair-sigil. Her palm cups the brass. Her fingers curl around it and finds the back.

Her thumb at the back.

Her thumb at the script.

She does not, at this moment, lift the disc to read it. She is not, at this moment, looking. She is, by every read I have on her, feeling the brass at her own bonded skin and registering the chemistry the bond has just locked at the conduit and the disc at the same time. Her eyes are on mine.

Her thumb traces the engraved characters on the back without looking at them.

She does not ask what the script says.

I do not tell her.

She will ask. She is going to ask some evening from now when she takes the disc off in this bed and turns it over and reads it and lifts her dark eyes to mine and says one word, Tael, at the register the female says when she has just found a thing her bonded male did to her in the formal Draelith script of his own dead language and has, by the Natalie protocol, decided what she is going to do about it.

I am going to deserve what she does about it.

The smirk holds.

I kiss the disc once, at her sternum.

Then I sit back.

The second disc is still in my palm.

She looks at it.

Her eyes go from the disc to my throat. To the hollow where the mark she set sits. Where there is no brass.

Her eyes come back to my palm.

“Tael.”

“Sweetheart.”

“And the second.”

“Mine, sweetheart. By Draelith protocol the matched pair is always commissioned together. The male wears the half with the female’s name on it, at his throat, every day for the rest of his bonded life. The female wears the half with the male’s name on it, at her throat, every day for the rest of her bonded life. The discs are, by Master Velran’s commission, one.”